The World's Oldest UFO Photograph is Hiding a Secret
There's more to this story than meets the eye!
Perhaps you've seen the following photo of a UFO in front of a large thunderhead cloud. This photo shows up in a lot of UFO books and online in various places. It was taken at the Mt. Washington Observatory in New Hampshire in 1870.
Something Seemed Whacky
When I first saw this photo, I was impressed, but something about it felt "off". The cloud swirls in the thunderhead don't match with any other photos of thunderheads.
Of course, since this was a photo taken in 1870, perhaps the level of technology was such that it was a time exposure, and perhaps the camera had moved or jiggled during the exposure. That felt reasonably possible, although the black cylindrical object in front of the cloud wasn't affected in the same way. I was determined to find out what was going on in this photo.
Photo Forensics Boot Camp
As a seasoned software engineer and MUFON member off and on for almost 30 years, I've recently been putting efforts into creating software to help with UFO investigations. One area of my efforts has been with photo analysis of possible UFO images. My Two-Camera UFO Analysis article here on Medium.com received considerable interest, and as a result I was asked to prepare and present a session at MUFON's upcoming first Photo Forensics Boot Camp for certified MUFON Field Investigators in May of 2025.
As I started doing preliminary research for my talk, I came across this ancient UFO photograph from Mt. Washington, and discovered something very interesting! It all has to do with parallactic shift. Let me explain.
Stereoscopic cameras in 1870
The first regular meteorological observations on Mount Washington were conducted by the U.S. Signal Service, a precursor of the Weather Bureau, starting in 1870. Also in that same year, the first commercially available stereoscopic cameras became popular. It turns out that the famous photo shown above is actually one side of a photo that can be viewed in one of the old-timey hand-held 3D viewers of the day.
NOTE: It's been brought to my attention that the images should be swapped left and right for the proper 3D effect when eyes are crossed. See below...
It's a little tricky, but if you stand back and look cross-eyed at this double image until the two images merge in the middle, you can get a sense of the 3D nature of this image. The slightly bulging big cloud appears just behind the object, and the cloud peaks near the edges appear further away and into the distance.
But hold your horses!
We have a problem here. I did a lot of research, interviewing experts and finding information on the stereoscopic cameras of the day. The two lenses on these cameras were spaced apart about 2 1/2 inches, to match the separation of normal human eyes. The intent, of course, was to reproduce the stereoscopic vision we would expect in real life. The two images were exposed at the same time on the same glass plate carrying wet or dry emulsions that were being experimented with at the time.
This means that the "clouds" must be extremely tiny and nearby - perhaps just a few feet away, to provide the 3D parallactic shift effect seen in this stereoscopic image. Big clouds in the distance would be at "infinity" compared to the lens spacing, so no 3D effect would show.
Quantitative analysis
If you've attempted the cross-eyed view of the images above, you likely noticed it quickly made your eyes and brain ache a bit, and it's tricky to see the depth for the various parts of the images. So perhaps they cheated when making this stereoscopic image? It turns out this is extremely unlikely. Let's look at the data and facts.
I used some of the software tricks I've been working with for 3D analysis using two cameras to mathematically figure out what's going on in a less subjective and more quantitative and accurate way.
How it works
Basically, without going into all the technical details, if you know the FOV (Field of View) angle for the width of these images, and if you know the lens spacing, you can determine from exact pixel locations of matching points in the images, how far away from the camera those points are in space.
I spent a lot of time asking experts what the focal length and image sizes were in these cameras, as there's a simple mathematical way to calculate the FOV angle given these parameters. The best estimate we came up with was about 53 degrees from left to right edges, but I tried angles from 20 to 70 degrees just to be sure, with much the same results. At those extremes, the object is somewhere between 2 feet and 9 feet from the camera, with 3 feet 3 inches being the distance with the assumption of a 53 degree field of view.
What about the other distances?
Here are a few of the measurements that came from my pixel to pixel analysis, again with the assumption of a 53 degree FOV. The tip of the big "thunderhead" is at 4' 0". A clearly identifiable spot in the bottom left foreground of the big cloud is at 2' 10". The left end of the unknown object is at 3' 3" and the right end is at 3' 4".
So what the heck?
It turns out that Mt. Washington has some of the most wicked weather anywhere around. The highest wind speed ever recorded by a staffed weather station in the United States was 231 miles per hour, recorded on April 12, 1934 at the Mount Washington Observatory.
A phenomenon called rime ice happens often at this location, caused by humidity forming thick icy frost on all surfaces in high winds. Some of this frost accumulates to a few feet in thickness.
Amazingly, and counter-intuitively, these tendrils of frost point into the direction the wind is coming from, not in the direction it's going.
What rimes with stick?
No, I spelled that right, the photo is almost certainly of rime ice on rocks, with a stick, or something like a stick, sticking out. I thought the left end of the stick was touching the ice, but the right end measured to be about an inch further away from the camera. The stick is just short of 3 inches in length.
More verification
In my research I found the log for all the photos taken in 1870 at Mt. Washington by "Clough & Kimball", the names also printed at the edges of the stereoscopic images.
As you can see, there are many mentions of photos of very thick frost, and no mention of any thunderheads in the distance. The first few entries are frosting on the cake for this theory, so to speak.
Beyond a reasonable doubt
MUFON trains its Field Investigators to reach likely conclusions for explanations of UFO events, such as this photo, only when all the evidence reaches a subjectively high percentage of probability. Yes, that can be an elusive target, but the more and the better the evidence and the analysis, the more certain we can be that the answer is something mundane, or something out of this world! In this case, the quantitatively measured evidence is clear that this is not a UFO.
But this is a good thing
Whenever a UFO event or sighting can be explained away, as in this case, it actually reinforces the reliability of stating there is no explanation for some other sightings. MUFON researchers use science as much as possible to dig into and research sightings to find possible explanations. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have no business stating it's likely anything other than a duck. There are so many cases to research that even though they find a lot of "ducks", a huge residue of compelling cases turn out to be unexplainable. We are getting closer to the truth.
Disclosure
There are several ways we, as citizens of the planet, can actively pursue "disclosure" without necessarily waiting for, or pushing for, the authorities in the government, military, or industry to come clean with what they might know. If you find this subject fascinating, you can learn more about my book on this subject at Amazon... https://amzn.to/45rZrFs
Keep looking up!
John has been passionate about discovering the truth about UFOs, ever since witnessing strange objects many years ago. As a UFO investigator, John authored the book How to Investigate UFOs Using Your Smart Phone .
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